France. Paris and Nice.

I think that every stereotype I have of french people has been broken while traveling through France. To begin we arrived in Paris and planned on only having about 14 hours to wander around before we caught a night train to southern France. The problems began though when we realized that Paris is so much larger than any other city we have been to. There is no central part of the city because everything is so spread out. As such, we had no idea where we had to go to catch our next train. So we just walked into one of the train stations and asked which one we had to get to to get to Nice. He said Gare de Lyon. So we figured we had little time before needing to get there so we might try to see the Eiffel tower. Which ended up being quite a walk, but completely worth it. It was so cool to see it and I had forgotten just how large and magnificent of a feet it was to complete.

So we headed off toward the Gare de Lyon only to find out upon our arrival that it wasn't the train station we were suppose to be at after all. Welp, that sucked. Luckily the one we did need to be at was only a bock or two away- only our train was leaving in about twenty minutes. So we headed back out to the next train station. However, we soon found out that to leave Paris on a night train required a reservation... we didn't have one. And the station was closing in an hour with no trains available for us to take. Turns out though that we were not the only one in this predicament. We met a girl named Sophia who also didn't have a reservation and missed her train. She was Awesome. Super quirky and funny and she wanted to know if she could hang out with us until the morning when we would all be heading back to the station. We figured we would just go out to the Canal and sit on a bench. When we were about to leave a korean woman who spoke very little english cam eup and asked if she could come with us. Why not? So it was the five of us, me, Destiny, Logan, Sophia and Mi'young all heading out toward the water at 1 am.

The funny part is that we just kept walking until we were stopped by this young group of kids who had been sitting by the water drinking drinking wine and hanging out. They could clearly tell how confused we were and a few of them spoke such great english that they invited us to sit down and hang out with them. Most of them were 21 &22 and were so much fun! They asked us where we were all from and what had happened, so we told them about being stranded in Paris. Then one of them Tomar, offered for us to sleep on his floor. Having five of us  and no place to sleep, we said sure!

I have realized while traveling that no matter what goes wrong it will all work out in the end. Even in the moments when I had no idea what we were going to do, I knew that tomorrow was a new day. That even if we stayed up the until 5am and caught another train, everything will work out. I have enough faith in humanity in believe that.